Rum and Diet Coke

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Working
title: Mourning Animals: Rituals and
Practices Surrounding Animal Death

Contributions sought for an edited collection on the topic of how
humans deal with animal death. While there are a great many books and articles
on how people can cope on an individual level with the death of their companion
animal, and there is more recent work on how animals mourn the deaths of other
animals, I am interested in the cultural practices that have emerged
surrounding this issue. When did they begin? Are they limited to companion
animals? What scope and form do they take? What role do cultural beliefs play
in shaping them?

The
proposed book proposes to address the issue from a variety of perspectives, and
will be cross-cultural in scope. My hope is that it will include chapters on:

Pet cemeteries

Pet taxidermy

Shrines for animals

Animal memorials

Animal funerals

Virtual mourning

The extinction of species and how that is mourned

The concept of an afterlife for animals

How non-pet animals are mourned, and under what
circumstances

My own
chapter will focus on people’s belief in whether animals have an afterlife, the
Rainbow Bridge in particular, and which animals get to go there and why. Please email me at margo@animalsandsociety.org
or margo@rabbit.orgif you are interested in contributing to this
book.Once I have all of the proposed chapters lined up, I will put
together a more formal proposal and shop it around. I am working with a tentative
September 2014 deadline for receipt of all chapters.

Bekoff
speculates on his blog that it may have been banned because it contains
sex and violence (although of the animal sort), two of the issues that
Texas school board officials tend to find problematic in books that
their students read, although clearly, as Bekoff points out, one issue
is that it gives an evolutionary argument for animal emotions. (Other
issues that they don't want students reading about include religion,
race, and politics, which explains why To Kill a Mockingbird is among those restricted to many Texas students.)

For
me, the book is problematic in a state like Texas because of its
claim-apparently still controversial to many-that animals do in fact
have emotions. Until recently (or apparently, even today), if a
scientist like Bekoff attempted to describe the behavior of an animal
with terms like "sadness," "jealousy," "grief" or "joy," they would
quickly be accused of that most dreaded (and unscientific) of terms:
anthropomorphism.

It is true that no human can ever truly get
inside the mind or heart of an animal-without dissecting it-and animals
have a difficult time answering our questions if we ask them how they
feel, which forces us to interpret their behaviors. But the belief that
animals have no emotions, or that emotions are "human" capacities that
we can only inscribe to animals, has certainly-and this is no
coincidence-benefited those who exploit animals. As Jeffrey Masson wrote
in his 1995 book When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals,
granting animals the ability to think, to reason and-perhaps most
importantly of all-to feel, opens up a Pandora's box of issues regarding
how we, as a society, should treat animals:

The professional and
financial interests in continuing animal experimentation help to
explain at least some resistance to the notion that animals have a
complex emotional life and are capable of experiencing not only pain but
the higher emotions such as love, compassion, altruism, disappointment
and nostalgia. To acknowledge such a possibility implies certain moral
obligations. If chimpanzees can experience loneliness and mental
anguish, it is obviously wrong to use them for experiments in which they
are isolated and anticipate daily pain. At the very least, this poises a
matter for serious debate-a debate that has scarcely begun (page xx).

Most
house rabbit people have seen their rabbits "binky" or dance as an
expression of joy, as well as execute a not-very-graceful "flop," in
which they fall to their sides in a gesture of deep contentment. When
Margo first introduced her rabbit Helga to Chester, he would leap, hop
and skip when she was first placed (angrily) into the living room every
day. Never mind that she was repelled by him; he was so thrilled to have
a potential new playmate that he could not contain his joy. For weeks,
Chester would lie as close to Helga as he could, staring amorously at
her; once she finally agreed to let him touch her, he began to spend as
much time as possible scrunched up against her.

Puddles and
Muddles, Margo's angora rabbits, also binky, but for a different reason.
Every morning, Margo opens their gate so they can come out to exercise,
but one of the first things they do is go to the living room to eat
Chester's food and mess up his things. Upon catching them in the act,
Margo chases them back out of the living room and watches as they race,
skipping and jumping across the house, back into their room. These
rabbits seem overjoyed at the fact they once again got away with
something funny. Their actions, in fact, look much like a full-body
laugh.

Many rabbits will lick their paws or wash their faces when
they are complimented, as if they are very pleased or slightly
embarrassed. House Rabbit Society founder Marinell Harriman's first
rabbit, Herman, also once saved a mouse. When Herman found a cat
torturing the mouse, she thumped her foot in protest. When that failed
to deter the cat, she attacked her, allowing the mouse to escape
(Harriman 1991). Other rabbits show an amazing amount of compassion
towards members of their own species, such as the examples we have cited
of healthy rabbits acting as support (both physical and emotional) for
their disabled friends.

Many rabbits, demonstrate an amazing
spirit when confronting adversity. We have already written about rabbits
like Hopper, Pippin and Mrs. Bean-all injured by people and left
without the ability to walk. Both Pippin and Mrs. Bean learned to use a
custom-built cart to get around, and their personalities blossomed. Mrs.
Bean savored her new freedom, using the cart to create a new,
independent life for herself, while Pippin used his to get attention and
to interact with people.

Even before using the cart, Pippin
seemed happy to join Margo's household after what he had been through,
executing a flop on his first day without the use of his rear legs.
Hopper never did learn to use the cart well, but like the others, he
adapted to his altered condition with grace and dignity, and charmed
everyone who met him with his peaceful, gentle, and loving personality.

Some
rabbits who have suffered abuse, injury or illness have responded to
human kindness and care with what can only be described as gratitude.
Many of our own rabbits have lost their aggressive or terrified
tendencies after being nursed through serious illnesses or injuries and
given kind, consistent treatment. Mr. Bop, for instance, was so ill and
so depressed when Susan first brought him home that he barely hopped-he
would follow her around the house by taking a few steps and then lying
down and staring up at her. After about a month of good food, plenty of
water, medication, and many kind words and pats, his depression lifted,
only to reveal an alarmingly spastic skittishness. Bop would dive under
the bed or behind a chair whenever someone walked into the room; loud
noises sent him nearly to the ceiling. It was only after six months that
his fearfulness-no doubt a product of his having been attacked by some
kind of predator while a stray on the streets of San Francisco-eased.
Today, he can pop binkys and spin wheelies with the best of them. He can
doze through through the roar of a vacuum cleaner, the shriek of a
smoke detector and the wails of a baby. He once even sprawled out on his
belly, with his hind legs stretched out behind him, smack dab in the
middle of a party of shrieking four-year-old girls dressed like
princesses. That's confidence (pp. 343-346).

Why does it
matter that rabbits-or any of the hundreds or thousands of other species
of animals-possess, and demonstrate, such emotions? Or maybe the more
important question, in light of the banning of The Smile of a Dolphin is why is it deemed so dangerous that our students find out this information?

Simple.

If
we knew about their ability to feel love, joy, sorrow and pain, we
could not bear to treat them the way that we do now. So it's simply
better to live in ignorance, and to force our school children to do so
as well.

Sunday, June 30, 2013

I’m not a religious person, but I recently discovered this
video, titled “God Made a Dog,”
that’s been circulating on the Internet recently.

It’s a heartwarming video
that outlines all the ways that dogs provide comfort, love, and companionship
to people, without asking anything in return. Whether or not you believe that God, or any
other spiritual being “made” dogs, or that dogs evolved via natural selection (with
or without some divine intervention), clearly dogs’ presence in our lives is an
unbelievable gift. I know I am grateful
every day for the five dogs who share my home.

But is everyone who lives with a dog grateful? Obviously
they aren’t.

If you read the recent Animals & Society Institute
newsletter, or the Harvest Home Facebook page
, you read about Handsome Pete, the Chihuahua I brought home from California last
week who was found on the side of a rural road by a volunteer with Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary.
His face had been smashed in, on at least two occasions, leaving him with a jaw
disconnected from the rest of his face, a snout without any bones left in it,
and a ruptured eye. The veterinarian who saw him recommended euthanasia because
his injuries were so severe. But the volunteers at Harvest Home, after talking
to my husband and me, decided to give him a chance at life, and we agreed to give
the little guy a home if he survived. A month later, after what the
veterinarian herself called a “miraculous” recovery, the dog who we are now
calling Handsome Pete is now at his new home in New Mexico, living with his
four new Chihuahua companions, and a house full of rabbits, three cats, and a
bird who screams at him when he walks by.

How did Pete get to the place in rural Stockton where he was
found? Did he get out of his house and hit by a car, and then wander the levee
roads for a week or two, injured and in pain, with no one looking for him? Or
even worse, did he get beaten, once or maybe twice, and then get abandoned? Or
did he get thrown out of a car?

In either of these cases, he appears to be just one of
millions of dogs in this country who was unlucky enough to not be appreciated.
Maybe he peed on something, or barked at something, or chewed on something, or
just didn’t do something right. At my house, he has peed on a couple of things,
but he’s quickly learning where to pee and poop, even though he obviously doesn’t
like to use the dog door, because his nose is still sensitive. I don’t know if
he ever chewed something he wasn’t supposed to, but he will never do that again,
because he can’t ever bite down on anything again, since his jaw will never
work again. He also hasn’t barked since he’s gotten here.

But I do know that in watching the “God Made a Dog” video, Petey
meets virtually every criteria that the video maker outlines—he comforts me
when I’m sad, he stays up all night to watch TV with me, cuddles with me, and
does everything that he possibly can (except maybe sniff out bombs and lead the
blind). So why would someone possibly hurt him? And why would people—millions of
people every single year, God loving and God fearing people, people who most
likely DO believe that God made dogs—hurt and abandon millions of dogs?

Saturday, March 30, 2013

I recently got back from the three-day Living with Animals Conference at Eastern Kentucky University, co-hosted by Bob Mitchell and Julia Schlosser. It was a fabulous conference, featuring a variety of talks covering all facets of the human-horse relationship (Kentucky is, after all, the horse capital of the United States), teaching human-animal studies, and a variety of other topics of interested to a human-animal studies scholar such as myself.

There were a number of talks I was especially taken by. Besides horses, art was heavily featured at the conference, perhaps because Julia Schlosser is an artist and art historian. She gave her talk, for example, on the use of roadkill in the work of artists Steve Baker and Craig Stecyk. Dead animals showed up in another artist’s presentation, that of Mary Shannon Johnstone, a North Carolina photographer who photographs shelter animals. One of her projects, called Discarded Property, photographs companion animals before, during, and after their euthanasia, and her current project, Landfill Dogs, involves taking dogs who have been at her local shelter for more than two weeks, and who will soon face euthanasia, to the landfill where their bodies will be buried, and photographing them where they play joyfully on what may be their last excursion outside in their lives. The great news is that thanks to her talent and courage, most of the dogs Johnstone has photographed have since found homes, and have not ended up back at the landfill. Another artist, Keri Cronin, spoke about the course she created in the Visual Arts Department at Brock University which combines animal studies and art in an interesting way.

While some of the artists showed dead or dying animals in their work, other scholars also talked about or showed dead animals as well. Emory University graduate student Christina Colvin, for example, presented a paper on taxidermied pets and the pet preservation industry. While most of us would never consider freeze-drying our dead companion animals so that they will remain with us forever, for some people, this act apparently brings them some sense of satisfaction. University of Mississippi English professor Karen Raber, on the other hand, showed delicately rendered drawings of dissected horses from the Renaissance, while American Studies historian Brett Mizelle discussed the ways in which butchers and slaughterhouse owners used images and text to elevate their professions at the turn of the century. And Monica Mattfeld, from the English Department at the University of Kent, discussed the memorialization of a dead performing circus horse whereby his hide was turned into a thunder drum.

While the conference certainly had plenty of wonderful talks that didn’t have to do with animal death, it was this topic that affected me the most, and I’m now ruminating on my next book project. If you love animals, and live with animals, animal death is a topic from which you will never be able to escape. And more broadly speaking, if you advocate for animals in any way, death is ever present, perhaps not in your own household or life, but for billions of animals every year. It’s what drives many animal advocates to do what they do, after all. For example, anthropologist Tamar Victoria Scoggin-McKee spoke movingly about her documentation of the people who work to save ex-racing horses from slaughter, and how the threat of death shapes the human-horse relationship.

As a rabbit rescuer, I think about death often—both the death of my own rabbits, since their lives are inevitably, and unfairly, so short. But I, and my fellow rescuers, also think about death, because we often feel as if we are the only ones who stand between rabbits, both in our own communities and even more broadly speaking, around the world, and death. It’s a difficult—and unrealistic—burden to take on, and it’s no doubt one of the reasons so many of us suffer from compassion fatigue, and use food, alcohol and other substances to cope with our messy emotions.

Living with Animals was a fantastic opportunity to hear interesting talks, to network with people doing great work, and for me personally, a good way to put some of my own thoughts and emotions about living with animals into a wider context.

Friday, September 7, 2012

Tonight I got to give two talks at Adams State College, one on body modification and women and one on animal bodies. Someone who attended shared with me a picture his student drew to promote my talk. Here it is--super cool!

Friday, August 31, 2012

I just got back
from a two-week vacation. My husband, our four dogs, our parrot, and three of
our rabbits packed up our little trailer and took off to visit state and
national parks in Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. We visited Rocky Mountain
National Park, Cheyenne Mountain State Park, Garden of the Gods, Great Sand
Dunes National Park, and Arches National Park, but our favorite spots were
those areas where we saw wildlife: Yellowstone National Park and Antelope
Island State Park.

At Yellowstone,
we saw—and photographed—coyotes, marmots, a long-tailed weasel, countless
bison, eagles, and elk, and at Antelope Island we saw antelope, jack rabbits,
and had bison walk right by our campsite. It was heaven for animal lovers like Tom
and I, and the dogs were thrilled with seeing and smelling so many animals.

After I got
home, and went through all of my photographs, and those taken by Tom, I noticed
that we hardly had any of each other. We had lots of beautiful scenery shots,
and a lot of pictures of the animals enjoying their vacation, but we took a
huge number of photos of the wild animals that we saw. I had to ask myself,
why?

I know I’m not
unusual. People love watching animals. At Yellowstone, there were a number of
times when a half a dozen cars would be pulled off to the side of the road, as
other tourists just like us were pausing to watch, and photograph, the animals
grazing alongside the road.There is
something thrilling about seeing wild animals up close, engaged in their normal
behaviors, but letting us see them as well.

But it goes
beyond just watching them. I know I’m not the only person who was trying to
figure out how I could possibly steal a baby bison and bring him home to raise
in my house. While of course I would never do such a thing, I won’t lie: I thought
a lot about how my new companion would littertrain himself (of course I would
have to get him a very big box), and would watch TV with us at night.

Clearly, one
reason Americans are so captivated by animals today is the disappearance of
animals from our lives. In our post-industrial world, companion animals remain
the only form of physical connection that Americans have with animals. But
apparently, the dogs, cats and rabbits we share our homes with are just not
interesting enough for many of us.

One problem with
this intense need to get close to wild animals is that most of us can’t
regularly go to Yellowstone to watch bison in their natural habitat. The result
is that for most people who want to get close to wild animals, they will
instead visit zoos, marine mammal parks, and circuses, which keep animals
confined in small spaces and in unnatural conditions, so that the public can
more easily see them. Visitors also like to see animals move. They
become bored when animals are sleeping, even when they are nocturnal and should
not be awake in the daytime. This leads to zoo patrons yelling at animals or
pounding or tapping on enclosure windows. Because just watching animals is often not
enough, many zoos and marine mammal parks also provide exhibits and events
that allow the public to ride, touch, feed, or get very close to animals. And
of course for many people, the fantasy to own a wild animal is not just a
fantasy. It is legal in most states to own wild animals, even when the
conditions in which these animals live are entirely unsatisfactory, and may
even pose dangers to animal and human alike.

Even the kind of vacation that I took is
not necessarily benign for the animals. In Yellowstone, we were told that
countless animals die every year when they are hit by tourists’ cars in the
park. Bears who are attracted to human food and garbage are often killed when
they get too close to humans. And the same bison that are protected and
venerated within the park boundaries are then subject to being killed by
hunters when they wander outside of the park into Montana or Wyoming. In
addition, some preliminary research is beginning to emerge on whether or not
animals can be harmed by ecotourism itself; one recent study, for example,
found increased levels of aggression in Tibetan macaques who interact
frequently with tourists; scholars think that the feeding of the animals may be
the cause of the aggression.

Women’s studies scholar
Chilla Bulbeck has studied ecotourism sites, and has interviewed attendees, and
has found that many visitors experience some guilt about visiting these sites,
knowing that the presence of humans is not good for the animals. Ultimately,
though, self-interest (the desire to see or touch the animals) wins out, even
for the more conservation-minded of the tourists—like myself. The irony is that
the more wild the site, the less the animals’ movements and behaviors are
controlled but the more that the visitors’ activities are constrained,
increasing the animals’ freedom (including their freedom to not be present) but
for many, decreasing the visitors’ pleasure.While I was thrilled to see a herd of wild antelope on Antelope Island,
I have to admit that I was frustrated that they were so far away that I could
not see their faces. Obviously, they did not want me to see their faces, but I was frustrated nevertheless. But
the animals grazing right alongside of the road, the ones that we got such
great photos of, were those that were in the greatest risk of being hit by
cars.

I still wonder about the coyote
that we saw wondering down the road one day in Yellowstone, weaving in and out
of traffic as we all furiously snapped pictures of him. Is he okay? Did he make
it where he was going? And did our presence in the park that day put his life
in danger?

I truly hope not. But
maybe the more important question would be: would my behavior have changed if
it did?

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Chick-Fil-A
has been in the news lately after the company’s president, Dan Cathy, gave his
and his company’s views on gay people’s right to marry. He said, “I think we
are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and
say, 'We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.'"

People who
believe that gays have, just as straight people do, the right to marry were
outraged that Cathy could publically support bigotry and homophobia. (Followers
of this issue already knew of Cathy’s stance, as the company had donated
millions of dollars to anti-gay groups previously.) Marriage, as many religious
conservatives don’t realize, is much more than a religious practice. In the
United States, it’s a civil practice, and it comes with thousands of federal
rights which are denied to gays. Conservative figures like Rick Santorum, Mike
Huckabee, Billy Graham, and Sarah Palin have weighed in on the debate,
publically supporting Cathy’s views, and asking their supporters to eat at
Chick-Fil-A. On the other end of the political spectrum, politicians like
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, have told the
company that it is unwelcome in their cities, and gay rights activists have
called for a boycott of Chick-Fil-A.

For animal
activists, there is much more to dislike about Chick-Fil-A than their position
on gay marriage. It has gone unmentioned in the current debate, but Chick-Fil-A
makes its profits—Chick-Fil-A is valued at $4.5 billion—off of the sale of
slaughtered chickens. In 2010, the company sold over 282 million chicken
sandwiches, which equals to 537 sandwiches a minute or 9 per second. Because
each sandwich contains one full breast, and a chicken has two breasts, that
means that 141 million chickens were killed in 2010 for Chick-Fil-A sandwiches.
In other words, 268 chickens per minute or 4.5 chickens per second lost their
lives to meet the demands of Chick-Fil-A’s hungry customers and to increase the
profits for the Cathy family.

Obviously,
Chick-Fil-A is just one of countless fast-food and regular restaurant chains to
sell chicken. Americans eat 7 billion chickens per year, and as most educated
consumers know, these animals spend the majority of their lives in confinement,
never experiencing fresh air, green grass, or an afternoon kicking up their
feet in the sun. Instead, they live and die in misery, and are not even
protected by a single federal law; they are excluded from all federal animal
protection laws. If you’ve ever spent time with a chicken, you probably know
that they are smart, inquisitive and funny animals, who enjoy the most simple pleasures—pleasures
which are denied to billions of these animals per year.

Boycotting
Chick-Fil-A probably won’t do much to further the cause of marriage equality
for all in this country. Chick-Fil-A has enough socially conservative
customers, especially in the southern states, to make up for those who no
longer give the company their business. But no longer eating chicken sandwiches
at Chick-Fil-A, or at McDonald’s, KFC, or any of the countless other
restaurants and establishments that serve chicken, could make a serious dent in
the number of chickens who die each year.